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AI Stylometry Identifies Anonymous Authors: Is Writing Style Now Biometric Data? (blazetrends.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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The secret weapon of stylometry -- the statistical analysis of writing style -- is something called “function words.” Most people assume AI looks for unique topical vocabulary. It actually looks for words like the, and, of, and in. Authors use these filler words unconsciously. Because you do not think about them, they are incredibly difficult to fake or manipulate. You naturally drop them into sentences at a highly specific, mathematical rate, making your "word print" almost wholly unique.

Edit : Since this seems to be an AI summarization (the whole site seems to be, upon closer investigation), here's the original journal article from PLOS .

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[–] 14 points 4 months ago (3 children)

I was thinking about this myself recently. Ironically, i think passing a draft through an LLM could be a reasonable way to remove these signatures, if one could stomach the stylistic homogenisation.

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  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    passing a draft through an LLM

    You have good company. It's also proposed by privacy experts.

    Ofc as you said, it has costs. Homogonized style, yes. But the line between AI altering style, and AI writing posts is thin. We lose our remaining ability to even tell the diff. Even today some social medias are said to be over 50% bot posts. Up to 90% in some political areas.

    IDK. We're between a rock and a hard place. No matter what we do, enshittification grows worse.

    I hate it.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 4 months ago

    Yeah, I expect this will become standard for authors of anything remotely controversial (who want to remain anonymous). On the other hand, if so much public speech sounds the same, those authors who push forward with their own unique style may stand out a lot more.

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